Abstract [en]

Web accessibility is a phenomenon that recently has drawn a lot of attention, particularly for governments, with enforcement of new laws and international standards. The term Web accessibility is about how people with disabilities are able to perceive, understand, navigate and interact with the web. The results of this study, however, show that language also can be a part of web accessibility. Even though the attention has increased, it has been shown that lots of websites suffer from poor accessibility. Some of these deficiencies can relate to how people work with web accessibility and the problems and challenges this work face, which is something this study has aimed to investigate.

The study has been conducted in a qualitative interpretive spirit with a case study at Migrationsverket, which is one of 22 so called strategic governments in Sweden with a special responsibility towards disability politics. The data has been gathered through six interviews with five different people with responsibility towards web accessibility within the studied organisation. The empirical data were then compared with previous research in the area in order to achieve a credible result and enable general conclusions.

The results of the study highlights guidelines, user involvement and technical tools as common components in the process of working with web accessibility and that language should be included as a part of web accessibility. The study also emphasizes that governments can bump into problems and challenges in this process in the form of lack of attitude, lack of competence, lack of managerial support, inadequate tools, inadequate standard guidelines, complicated user involvement, government procurement and out dated systems.